A plane was shot down over Russia near the border with Ukraine on Wednesday, killing 65 Ukrainian prisoners on board. The author was still unclear on Wednesday, but Moscow sees him in Kiev.
If the suspicion is confirmed, yesterday, Wednesday, was by far the worst air accident to date related to the Russian-Ukrainian war.
What is certain is that late in the morning a large four-engine transport plane Ilyushin Il-76 (NATO code: Candid) belonging to the Russian military crashed in a field near the village of Jablonovo, in the Russian region of Belgorod. The region borders northeastern Ukraine, near Kharkiv. According to Russian information, the plane was shot down and inside it there were 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war. There were initially no clear comments from Ukraine, but the media reported, citing the General Staff, that the Ilyushin had carried anti-aircraft missiles.
Still from one of the videos of the Baza accident
According to Russian media and authorities, the 65 Ukrainians were supposed to fly from Moscow to Belgorod and be sent to a prisoner exchange at the border. There were 74 people on the plane, including crew and guards. On radar, the launch of two or three Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles was observed, of which at least one hit the aircraft.
Western anti-aircraft weapons?
“The Ukrainian leadership knew that the Ukrainian military personnel to be exchanged would be brought to Belgorod today by military plane,” Moscow's Defense Ministry said in a statement. Parliament Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, in turn, attributed the shooting down of German or American Iris-T or Patriot missiles.
Videos on social media show a large plane falling from the sky and crashing into a fireball. In one case, the blast cloud from an anti-aircraft missile may be visible in the sky some distance behind the aircraft. According to a source, it is noticeable that the plane did not approach Belgorod airport, but rather moved away from it and probably took off from there. The Russian military quickly expelled civilian rescuers from the site and took sole control. Photos of rubble had already appeared, but apparently no bodies until evening.
Reactions from the Ukrainian side were initially noticeably muted. For a long time, several bodies refused to comment, but later an office responsible for POW issues said it was investigating the Russian allegations. Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets, who was also one of those responsible for the prisoner exchanges, announced an investigation. A swap was reportedly planned for Wednesday.
In the evening, Ukrainian military intelligence reported that the Russians had not requested to maintain airspace security over Belgorod within a specific time window before the switch. This has always happened in previous exchanges. This can be seen as an indication that the Ukrainian side actually fired at the plane without knowing the situation, but ultimately wants to blame Russia for this.
Noticeable accumulation of deaths
More recently, several Russian aircraft have crashed some distance from Ukraine, including Su-34 “Fullback” multirole fighters, SU-24 “Fencer” heavy fighter-bombers, and, on January 14, a large Beriev battlefield control. A-50 and Sea of Azov reconnaissance aircraft. In this case, the Ukrainians took responsibility for the shoot down, but in Beriev's case it was more likely to have happened with a fighter plane than with a Patriot missile, as the range would have been too short for that, according to some sources. The matter is still unclear, there is also the theory that it was shot down by our own anti-aircraft units.
Ukraine's allies are committed to ensuring that their weapons, such as surface-to-surface missiles, are not effective against targets in central Russia. If that happened here, it could make the situation even worse.
The Il-76 has been built since the early 1970s, with more than 950 units so far. Russia has at least 130 of them and has lost five so far in the Ukraine war. Although it is considered robust and can withstand many fires and land off the runway, according to an air accident data platform, at least 94 Candids have already been irreparably damaged or destroyed by accidents and other causes, i.e. around ten percent . Around 1,100 people died.
The biggest accident so far was the crash of an Il-76 belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in 2003 (275 fatalities). In June 2014, pro-Russian rebels in Donbass shot down a Ukrainian Il-76 with paratroopers on board near Luhansk. All 49 occupants died.